Hi, first of all thank all you guys at computing.net for helping me with computer troubles. I've owned a personal computer for 7 years now and this forum has always been a great help with my computing troubles. The trouble i have is that whenever I play a video game, it would either crash and restart the computer, freeze and never load the desktop back up, or actually allow me to play the game, except the screen will 'break' every 5-7 seconds and look like a broken mirror for a split second. It's been like this ever since I put the computer together. I've tried all different kinds of drivers for my Nvidia FX5900XT 128MB. 53.03, 81.xx, the recent 84.21, so on and so forth. All of them gave me the same exact problem. I play games such as Wolfenstein:Enemy territory, WarcraftIII:Frozen Throne and Rome:Total war. WCIIi and RTW shares the same problem as the screen randomly 'cracks' like a broken mirror for a split second and then goes backto normal again. In Enemy Territory, there's no 'cracking' of images, but the texture colors glitch out. Sometimes it's the axis soldier's face texture that turns like a channel surfing TV except with blue, red, and green dots mixed with the black and white. Sometimes it's an entire side of the map, sometimes it's just the corners. And unlike WC3 and RTW, these colors stay as 'corrupted skins' instead of flickering in and out for quick second in wc3 and RTW game. Most of the time when the game crashes it won't even give me a specific warning message since it would just freeze up or restart the computer entirely. But when it does, it's always different. Sometimes it says to update the DirectX (it's already been updated to 9.0c), sometimes it says there's not enough power being fed into the graphic card, which I'm most suspicious of. But I have a 350watt power supply and don't have too many appendages on my computer. 1 dvd drive 1 CD-RW drive, nothing in my PCI slot. Video card is on AGP slot. This particular case: tsunami dream, has 4 blue LED light which could be draning the power, but they're smaller than your pinky nail, and I've ran a bigger LED light on a weaker power supply before and it was still fine. The thing is, it gave me a similar trouble before when I had the G-Card installed in my previous computer with much lower specs. But the only one that it had problem with was WC3, as sometimes the game crashed when I played it on high settings. But as soon as I lowered its settings the problem went away. Now I have a much better computer, yet the problems are now much worse. And the errors I get are never unified, but pretty random. On some days the glitches would be a lot worse, while on other days when I play the games, there would be very few. It's very inconsistant, which puzzles me even more. Perhaps I just have a generally faulty Graphic Card? I got it for free from my friend in France. Thank you

Oh and another thing. The Graphic card has no problem displaying the desktop or playing DVDs/AVIs. Only when it comes to full screen video games that it has such troble running them. Thank you

Sounds faulty to me... Try seeing if it is overclocked.. And if its complaining about not enough power, check to see if you plugged in the Molex Power Connecter to it. While its an old GPU, it used to be top of the line and required external power to run properly. Same sort of thing happened to me when I connected my 7800GT :) it would warn me that I didnt have enough power and games would screw up. So check external power. If that dont work, then just get a new card. You got it for free anyway. Best value card at the moment is the 7600GT. Pentium 4 3.2Ghz 2048mb DDR2 Ram GeForce 7800GT Windows XP Professional SP2

Thx for the quick response Power is definately connected. I unplugged it and plugged it back in. Still everything is the same. How do I check if it's overclocked? Thank you

I recently purchased a new power supply (500 watt), and the problem still persists. Perhaps it's the graphic card itself that has been damaged somehow? Thank you, Athlon 64 2500+ 1 gig ram nvidia FX5900xt